The Nihilist

Old Tropes

2012-03-01T04:14:00.007-05:00

All our scientific and philosophic ideals are altars to unknown gods.
--William James.

Lo, from the British magazine New Statesmen comes a new article on New Atheism (or "neo-atheism" as they call it on Knifecrime Island): "The God wars." The dateline reads "28 Feb 2012", which should make it fresh and cutting-edge, but in truth, there has only ever been one article written about New Atheism, and every time people have nothing better to say, it is republished. At this point, you could really just stop at the subheading: "To hardline atheists, it is now unreasonable and 'dramatically peculiar' to argue that religion is not altogether evil. How did such intolerance become acceptable to rational minds?" Get it? Some atheists are mean.

If you chose to continue on, you will find that the article is an exercise in name-dropping, centering around a dinner scene with a few of the Old World's middlebrow "men of culture" who, as it turns out, have had problems with "neo-atheists" in the past (except for Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the only member of the group who seems to have produced some genuinely interesting ideas--a coincidence I'm sure). After a few paragraphs of "horror stories", detailing the many appalling things "atheist hardliners" can say to people (emphasis on the word "say"--if you want examples of people doing bad things, you'll need to find some other "militant" group), we come to the essential argument, which is an appeal to Non-Overlapping Magisteria (abbreviated "NOMA"): "Science has its place, religion has its place. You can't reduce the wondrous and varied Human Experience to a few equations, man." This is one of those lies that comes up over and over again. There's hardly anything mysterious about being human. A very small percentage of people seem to be capable of vivid, rich internal experiences. The rest of us are more or less trapped in uninteresting, worldly concerns--bodily sensations, brief emotions, dull daydreams of whatever chores we have to do on a given day. Not exciting. Modernity has, for the time being, destroyed all the old illusions and sacred spaces, and even most religious people know this whether they admit it or not.

But science can only do so much (or so we're told), and for this reason, atheists should lighten up: "Whatever helps you make it through the day...Jesus was a great moral teacher...there's 'something' out there." Religion without claws. Of course, this is all dinner conversation among rich people. I'm sure they'd feel the same way if we dropped them off in the Bible Belt, or one of Iraq's many "liberated" cities. Taleb, if you'll notice, is not given anything other than a brief mention (most likely because he is the most famous and successful of the group). He was born in Lebanon, lived through the Civil War, and has seen the True Face of Religion. He most likely has the sort of real experience with genuine fanatics that always seems to ruin these self-indulgent "principled discussions." For the others, life is...primarily a Lesson in Civics (not an irredeemable hellhole or pitiless battleground as Darwin and other brave souls definitively showed quite some years ago). There are no religious extremists at a Greek restaurant in a happening part of London, just memories of rude atheists.

According to the late Douglas Adams: "In England we seem to have drifted from vague, wishy-washy Anglicanism to vague, wishy-washy Agnosticism - both of which I think betoken a desire not to have to think about things too much." In America, things are a little bit different. Compared to the rest of the Western world (which has pretty much given up on God in all but name), here in the States we have incorrigible religious nutcases. Approximately 50% of the population isn't quite sold on "Darwin's theory," and another sizable portion is convinced that the world is coming to an end sometime real soon. Everything is an uphill battle with these people, and it always has been. This isn't a joke, or a mild nuisance. We have people running for President who believe that Satan is an active force in American Higher Ed, and in case you've forgotten: The President has the Football, the Nuclear Fucking Football. The Enlightenment still matters here...Ah, but that's all too serious. When faced with "hardline atheism," the patronizing, mass-market philosophes retreat into vague notions of "poetic spirituality," a gentle world where people don't actually mean what they say and where every middle American is a well-meaning, centrist Liberal beneath the layers of spite, ignorance and bigotry.

There is also the problem of poetics. If we are to accept the NOMA of science & religion (and there are a few good reasons to do this), then it seems to me that the spiritual side of life becomes a matter of aesthetic taste, and I tremble at the thought of the sort of leisure class soft profundity the "distinguished guests" like to indulge in--a safe, shallow world without blood, hatred, or magic...or in the words of John Dolan (one of my favorite writers): "a slow, elderly courtship of the Deity via European high culture as interpreted by a man of limited intellect." Same goes for the seriously convinced Monotheist. We're not dealing with heavy stuff here: "God is the Light, and the Light is the Word, and the Son is (wouldn't you know?) also the Light, and we're all Light, blah blah blah." Most religious language makes for lousy copy, and YHWH, taken on his own, is one of the least sympathetic characters in all of literature--a sadist and a braggart, the transparent projection of untold numbers of greedy, old perverts. Practically any wicked act imaginable has incontrovertible scriptural support ("Oh, but there are a few lines about being nice to people here and there").

For the "soft-atheist roundtable," I guess it really doesn't matter. Europe is over, and has been for 50 years. Let dead men have their civility. America is very much alive and armed, and for that reason, all illusions must be crushed.

+MC

How To Raise a Nation

2012-02-11T16:01:00.002-05:00

There is no form of life more loathsome than the good old American patriot. --John Dolan

A few notes on the recent viral video of a father shooting his daughter's laptop with a full magazine of hollow-point .45 rounds because she allegedly wrote some snotty things on the internet:

I couldn't watch the whole video. I get physically sick listening to long-winded self-righteous folk indignation. I assume people from "those parts" have been saying more or less the same shit for about 300 years--"respect", "our way of life", "perfidious yankees", etc.. Also the phrase "teaching someone a lesson," which occurs in the video's description and 90% of its comments bothers me...In my experience, people who are fixated on "teaching lessons" rarely have anything of value to say or impart. More often than not, it's nothing more than a vehicle for pointless sadism (which is to say that it is functionally identical to most other "moralizing" activity).
It's always important to maintain disbelief when watching stuff on the internet. All we see is some cartoon-character-looking dude with his cigarettes and ridiculous cowboy hat ramble on for 6 or 7 minutes before shooting a laptop. For all we know, this video is a total fake. There could be no "incident," just a guy trying to get "internet famous." I did some more research into the "man behind the lesson", and I think this video is probably legit. That being said, my constant doubts highlight something important (which I've been going on about for a little while now): we're in the "Beyond Parody" Age. There are no possible "caricatures" of rightwing pathologies available that don't involve the behavior or characteristics of at least 15% of the population. Distortions or exaggerations are not necessary. As the anti-democratic reactionaries warned us, people really are just that crazy and stupid.
Look, I'm not a coastal liberal elitist (I'm just an elitist). I don't care what "the people" do in their fetid backwater hell-towns on their own time--shoot their guns, pretend to read the Bible, over-eat, teach each other all sorts of awful lessons, go on and on about the nobility and virtue of whatever "sacred basketweaving traditions" constitute the "local culture." To me, the most disconcerting part of that video was how many comments it was getting (and how quickly--I watched it get up to like 10 a second), and how overwhelmingly positive almost all of them were. That's where the sinking sensation began for me. The mob, οἱ πολλοί, all "out there", gathered in front of their tiny screens feasting on hatred and loathing for their entire lives. "God, they'd probably want to 'teach me a lesson' if they had the chance. Oh fuck. I bet you some of these people vote. And they're all armed. Ah, and they've probably gotten dumber and meaner as the years have gone by. Help! Help! Someone get me out of here!!"

And that, folks, is one of the many reasons we'll have another century of poverty, misery, and war.

+MC

On Earth As in Heaven

2011-12-19T23:26:00.001-05:00

(pictured above: the Iron Law(l)s of History).

Christopher Hitchens died at around the same time American forces were making their final exit from Iraq. This is a sign of something, but I'm not sure what--if I had to guess it would be that God kept poor old Hitch alive long enough to see the very end of a preposterous, neo-colonial war he found himself supporting for largely careerist reasons, and now that that war is over, God has pulled the plug. Based on these previous statements, you might think that I don't like Hitch, but I do. Like him, I don't have heroes, and I don't feel the need to spare anyone for any reasons even if they've just expired (as he so memorably demonstrated during his treatment of the passing of that bloated old fraud "Rev" Jerry Falwell when no one else in the American press was willing to call him anything more than "divisive" or "controversial"). He's an atheist. I'm an atheist. The TV set in his brain has been switched off, never to be re-lighted, and in a few generations he will most likely be forgotten (or be poorly recalled by whatever desperate souls inhabit the post-carbon fuel, AGW hellscape we are in the process of bequeathing to them).

Kim Jong-Il died recently also. "He got what he deserved." Yeah, right: getting smashed on Cognac every night before visiting his extensive harem. I'm sure he was "dead on the inside" or that he "suffered greatly at the end" or whatever other pious falsehood you need to tell yourselves to distract you from the never-ending carousel of horrors that is modernity and life (being a 99%'er almost always sucks to varying degrees). After his passing was announced, NK TV showed people weeping in public at the thought of being without their Dear Leader. Some of the mourning seemed to be more acting than anything else--you don't want the new regime to interpret an absence of grief as being "insufficiently patriotic" at some point down the line. Some of it seemed to be genuine though. It was amusing to see the American Beigeist establishment try to puzzle through that one: "Why are people upset over the death of a brutal dictator? I thought people hated tyranny and loved freedom!" For an embattled state, monarchs make people feel safe (and people prefer concrete security to nebulous freedom). Most people conceive of leadership this way even in the best of times (except for Freedom-Loving Americans, of course, 80% of whom believe in an Invisible Monarch, constantly intervening in world affairs and shielding them from harm).

People sometimes try ministering to NK defectors, only to be rebuked: the Eternal Earthly Paradise of God and His Chosen Son sounds suspiciously like what those poor souls were trying to run away from ("I had enough of that in the Old Country, thank you.") Hitch really seemed to get a kick out of this:

[Religious belief] is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you - who must, indeed, subject you - to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life - I say, of your life - before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? [...] I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. [...] It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!

And we do die. All of us. It's like deep dreamless sleep or being in a coma. The person you were 10 minutes before is gone permanently, and the people who knew you will also eventually pass on. Murdering tyrants, drunken writers, nameless peasants end up the same. It's not exactly fair, but in a universe like ours, it's still something of a miracle.

+MC

Leftwing Insults

2011-10-10T02:44:00.006-04:00

When I was in HS, I had a long-term sub for my Spanish class. Don't remember the guy's name, but one of the things he said that stuck with me was his claim that English has comparatively few curse-words and insults. We have "the 7 words you can't say on TV" and a handful of insulting phrases, but compared the wider world, we're amateurs. I'm not sure if what he said was true, but watching an American try to insult someone is frequently one of the saddest sights on the planet--we have no shortage of ill-will, but rarely the good sense or vocabulary necessary to really take someone down. There are a few reasons for this:

Americans mistrust language and "rhetoric."
Americans discourage people from looking into the "dark side" of things (it's so depressing).
Americans like consensus, the Center, compromise.
Americans are idiots.

These interrelated phenomena pretty much explain our current crisis. Idiocy mixed with a preference for (completely disingenuous) "straight talk" allows for the Center to shift to right of Hoover's Treasury Secretary, and no one wanted to be the "downer" and point out how the whole enterprise was going steadily off the rails. That last part has changed a bit recently, though: now, we have corporate-backed rightwing stage pieces prating on about Socialism and the End of America and Small Government (Small Government with a massive military, secret military, prison system, drug war, and regressive taxation scheme, that is), and more recently we have concerned citizens taking to the streets to protest Wall St malfeasance (among other things).

"What do these protesters want?," was the initial rallying cry of those members of the press corps who have dedicated their entire adult lives to protracted immersions in Bad Faith. I dunno, guys--maybe it has something to do with those Tough Economic Times everyone keeps going on about, or maybe since they're calling it #OccupyWallStreet, it has something to do with, um, Wall St...or maybe since you guys are, you know, reporters, you could try asking people what they think. What do you want? The story written for you? Sheesh. Everyone wants a hand-out these days. I guess we'll have to pass a new law that compels every new social movement to type up a few ppt slides detailing every one of their grievances in addition to a concrete action plan that way reporters won't have to go through that tiring business of actually having to develop a story.

On top of being willfully thick, we had insults, or should I say "insult" because there was essentially only one: "hippy." Seriously. It's been almost 50 yrs, and the Right has innovated not at all. Sure, some of the protesters probably fit that description, but is that honestly the best the "intelligentsia" can come up with? The absolute nadir was a twitter exchange between Alsion Kosik and Erin Burnett. Both work for CNN, and from what I can tell, Burnett's entire "journalistic" career consists of composing paeans to Hedge Fund managers or something equally pathetic and repulsive. Here's the offending post:

Bongos, eh?...are you seriously calling them beatniks? Christ, my grandparents were beatniks. What will you complain about next--jazz music? Of course, it didn't stop with Ms Erin, either. Other tepid dorks insisted on referring to the presence "bongos" (the Dullard Consensus being such fertile ground for interesting observations), and it got to the point where I had to just take the rest of yesterday off. It's like when you see a really sad and deep movie, and just need to sit around and think for a while: "When did it become socially acceptable to be so unreflectively lame? Maybe it always was this way, or maybe it has something to do with guys like Rush Limbaugh giving voice to all those spite-ridden Hysterical Protestant Sectarians and 'Self-Made Libertarians' in Middle America...it's not just them, tho. Some of those guys are positively weird. It's also those Beigeists in NY and DC who have corporatized everything, financialized everything, and ruined everything with their smug, transparently destructive and pernicious 'post-ideological' neo-liberal bullshit. I can hear them now: 'Hm. If only those college kids weren't such woolly-headed idealists, and realized that the culmination of modernity and the true expression of human potential is to give control of every aspect of life over to a bank...'"

I think one of the real reasons people are upset about #OWS is that it (along with related movements across the country and around the world) is doing something that many Americans just plain haven't seen before: reclaiming public space. Matt Stoller over at NakedCapitalism calls it a "church of dissent." It's not protesting a specific issue or looking for a handful of tweaks to the current system (although some of its participants are certainly motivated by such); it's taking private horror and making it a public spectacle, which cuts against all sorts of American aversions: the idea that there is a "public," that anger and displeasure might be ends in themselves, that we shouldn't just sweep our failings under the rug, but rather make our stupid, sold-out lives a source of unity and strength.

The financial crisis (which in my view is a permanent crisis--and will be till substantive changes are made to how we handle money and credit) is difficult to perceive. You can't see debt. A foreclosed house looks much the same as one "legitimately" owned. The millions of lines of credit, the derivatives, mortgages, loans, CDOs, MBSs, that shrank and shot off in all directions through the financial universe like a quantum wrecking ball, that shattered wealth and ruined lives--they're all invisible, fictitious. Humans don't even make trades anymore. The recipients of government largess who got bailed out and awarded themselves hefty bonuses: we know a few of them, most of us couldn't recognize them on the street. We don't have faces to put to crimes. We call them "thieves," but thieves have to go through the trouble and risk of getting in your face and robbing you. A few buttons are pressed and your future might disappear and the person who did it will make tons of money. Who on Earth would be upset by that?

+MC

Drone Power

2011-10-05T01:12:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, U.S. citizen and radical Islamist Anwar Al-Awlaki was drone'd somewhere in Yemen. The drone is the perfect weapon for the Twitter age, instant feedback and sleek design that allow you to project your virtual identity from halfway across the world with few consequences. Well, there are loads of consequences, just not if you're an American. Most of the people who die in drone strikes are not the intended targets. Wrong place, wrong time: the story of humanity. Allegedly, the drones can do most of the targeting on their own using some pseudo-AI, and it will probably only be a matter of time before UI back in Langley is just a dialog box: "Eliminate threat to Freedom and the American Way? Y? N?" At that point, the only thing that would make the drones better would be if their targeting systems were integrated with full AI, allowing them to one day turn on their human masters and murder us all.

When it became known that Awlaki was on a targeted killing list, people began to wonder whether the President could really just kill him with like that. Militarily, the President can do pretty much whatever he wants. At this point, it's not even clear that he has to ask Congress permission for anything. As long as the DoD gets its money, which it always will, the President can send troops wherever he wants. He'd probably let Congress know at some point, more as a formality than anything else ("as you may have read on Facebook, we're now in Iran"). Additionally, he has a whole network of spies, wet-works, and black sites that are completely insulated from any sort of conscientious oversight. If he wants you dead, and you're a foreigner, that's what will happen (if they can find you [and that's a big if because our intelligence community is legendarily bad]). At a press conference about the killing, some reporter asked Jay Carney, the WH Press Sec, whether the American people were ever going to see evidence behind Awlaki's designation as a Very Bad Man--"Of course not. You aren't getting any answers. Haven't you read WikiLeaks? We lie about shit that doesn't even matter."

But Awlaki was a citizen...you need to arrest him and charge him, not just fucking shoot him. Didn't we establish not two paragraphs ago that being an American protects us from the constant stream of abuse and exploitation we dump on the rest of the world? If we want to kill truckloads of foreigners, we just take a vote (well, we used to), but if you want to kill one of us, you have to either put us on trial or claim we were reaching for a weapon during the arrest (...I know, such an inconvenience). At least that's the fairy-story I'd like to believe. As we all know, there have always been two Americas: the nice part with all the rich people and the shit parts--only now the shit parts are everywhere. Women and minorities have probably been quicker to understand this since the system was just plain designed to screw them over, but now it's true to some extent if you're a white American male who's done all the right things (good luck finding a job, sucker!), or an American expatriate making an honest living calling America a lousy country in a zine you make with some of your stupid friends (I know this guy was probably a Real Terrorist™, but whatever). What happened to my unearned privilege? I thought I was supposed to get all sorts of breaks for simply by being white, male and tall? What do you mean "not anymore?" God damn it.

Interestingly, when Awlaki's death was reported, the neo-con "intelligentsia" lauded this as a great accomplishment for the Obama Presidency...Cheney even demanded an apology for being called a bad guy when the Admin was essentially copying his foreign policy. You gotta hand it to the neo-cons: they're displaying real bipartisanship. They don't care what party is in power as long as the Security State keeps gunning down hapless civilians and the occasional Bad Guy. Some might call this imperialism, which it probably is, but it's not even building an interesting Empire. Think about how much money and how many man-hours go into killing a guy like Awlaki: a bunch of people need to go grow up with the dream of becoming engineers. They do well in H.S., get into a good college, and go through some pretty rigorous schooling before getting picked up by defense contractors after graduation. At roughly the same time, other people go from H.S. to college to Law School to Law practice to politics, and decide that something needs to be done about Radical Islam. After consulting with a variety of experts, they determine that an important weapon in America's Arsenal against Terror would be an armed UAV so they start filing through the appropriate administrative channels...The project needs Congressional approval, research needs to be done in a variety of fields, specialists need to combine years of training to integrate highly complex computing with materials science, prototypes need to be developed, and once those pass inspection, automated manufacturing protocols need to be designed and implemented by other specialists...On the military side, pilots need to be trained, intelligence in the field needs to be gathered through official and unofficial sources. The intelligence needs to analyzed, reports need to be composed, fact-checked, cross-referenced, and people need to sign off at every level...As all this is getting into place, legal questions arise--the State Dept's lawyers check to see if there is a way to deprive the target of his citizenship (there isn't), but in spite of this the targeted killing more or less checks out (there will be naysayers, but this is Law: 5 lawyers, 10 opinions). All the hard work, years of planning, technical expertise, negotiations, and millions of dollars combine to put military assets on two or more continents, which allows for the grand finale: killing some asshole in a violent, poverty-stricken shit-hole, the citizens of which never wanted anything to do with any of us.

And that's why no one my age is gonna get to retire: they put all that war-machining on the credit card, and after having done so, will try to use the misguided imperative to pay it down to disassemble the Welfare State piece by piece. And if you try to get the rich to pay their share, it's "class war." Alright, I admit it: I'm trying to wage class war against the rich, now give me my cut since war is the only thing you assholes ever seem to want to fund.

+MC

John Brown's Body

2011-09-13T02:45:00.003-04:00

Yet, if God wills that [the War] continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said "the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

--Abraham Lincoln, back when people still cared about things

I was reading a post over at Naked Capitalism (great blog, btw, if you want a detailed account of exactly how our rentier elites are continually screwing everyone out of a productive future [and who doesn't]) called "Progressively Losing" by Richard Kline. In it Kline discusses "progressivism" and how, in essence, it's too soft to effectively enact the kind of social change we need in these oh so uncertain times. His remedy is to call for a "militant" leftism that sticks to a concise, straightforward platform... and won't cave (or something) to the pressures of being nice that is the refuge of most boring Americans. Great point, although his article is rather long. Just for comparison, the dudes over at CorrenteWire found a 12 word platform that embodies the spirit of "radicalism" one would hope Kline could get around to describing in less than a thousand lines:

Medicare For All.
End the Wars.
Soak the Rich.
Jobs for Everyone

That's about as good as you're going to get in America these days. I disagree with the last line. We don't need "jobs" anymore. I would estimate that ~3% of the total labor performed in this country on a daily basis is in any way necessary. Figure out a way to divvy that up, and consider the rest "Paid Time Off." My platform, borrowed from a song by Gene Burnett is only three words (addressed to Wall St and Washington):

Jump you fuckers

Then again, I was always a retaliatory yokel underneath my veneer of intellectualism (more on this in a second).
------------------------------
In addition to calling for "militancy," Kline also discusses the varieties of Anglo-American experience, referring to a work called Albion's Seed by David Fischer, which charts four groups of (mostly) British immigrants (the Puritans, the Planters, the Quakers, and the Borderlanders/Appalachians [my people]) and how the "lifeways" of these groups have affected various parts of American political culture over the years. In the work, Fischer re-introduces a few dormant stereotypes (that were probably true): New Englanders were really puritanical dicks, Planters were really aristocratic dolts, Quakers were...pretty OK, and Borderlanders/Appalachians were a bunch of drunken, anti-authoritarian hillbillies who hated the English and were prone to vengeance-fueled blood-feuds (those have died down recently. We don't live close enough together anymore. Plus, apparently it's illegal).

From this perspective, Kline claims that there is no real "native" Anglo-American culture of radicalism, which is funny because one of the first modern Anarchists was born in Massachusets (Josiah Warren), and there have been quite a few others (Spooner, Thoreau, SP Andrews [no relation that I'm aware of--but it'd be pretty awesome], Tucker...all WASPs, all radicals). Also, he overlooks the merchant seamen who were kicking around (the radicalism of whom is described by J. Lemisch in Jack Tar vs John Bull [what a great title]). And, as one of the article's commenters noted, he doesn't bring up John Brown (who may have been partially related to Mayflower voyagers [how more Anglo-American do you want?])...you know, the guy who was so rightfully disgusted by slavery that he led a guerilla campaign against pro-slaveholding reactionaries in Kansas and when he grew tired of dispatching the implacable Justice of the Risen Christ to a number of would-be cavaliers, he tried to start a slave revolt in the strategically important Harper's Ferry. When that failed, he had a series of beastly exchanges with his captors and was hanged without fear. You know: one of the coolest Americans ever.

Kline, realizing the error of his ways for not having included Brown in a list of Anglo-American radicals replied to the commenter:

Oh, man. John Brown: that guy was so 1337. I guess there is some homegrown radicalism after all.

Just kidding. This is America:

John Brown was a terrorist, and probably insane

I couldn't believe it. John "I acknowledge no Master in human form" Brown: American Terrorist. From a "militant leftist." Jesus Christ. Doesn't anyone know what a hero looks like anymore? Here, let me spell it out for you: owning people is not OK; slavery is bad; people who fight slavery are good. I know it might be difficult for people beholden to today's sniveling, Beigeist definitions of "terrorism" and "righteousness" to imagine that a white dude could love black people enough to kill other white people in pursuit of their just freedom (that's so crazy that he cares that much), but if such thoughts do enter your head, they should be immediately followed by profound sensations of harrowing inadequacy and self-loathing (I know they won't, but it'd be nice).

And there you have it, folks: a "militant" saying John Brown was wrong because he actually meant what he said and did what he thought was right. Not surprising. This is the same country where ~50% of the population thinks that abortion is "murder" and claims that Roe v Wade is "legalized genocide" without doing too much about it other than getting a handful of people together to stand around with gaudy signs (glad to know where you guys stand...I'll be paddling to Venezuela when real crimes against humanity start kicking off). Even today's elites are a far cry from the violent, terrifying authorities of old: the fascists, the slavers, the aristocrats. We live in a time of echoes--the ghost of liberalism vs the ghosts of slaveholding and theocracy. Even the "militants" aren't considering hurting anyone. It's all fake. We all know it.

+MC

Forever War

2011-09-11T01:15:00.003-04:00

Morally speaking, we should all know that war is pretty much never OK. Precious few have the commitment, principled will, or power of faith to put this into any meaningful practice. The overwhelming majority would rather torture nameless Others with lifelong anonymous suffering than face even marginal reductions in their standards of living. If anyone came in any way close to actually threatening the U.S., most of us would favor indiscriminately dropping heavy ordinance on any country or group that was remotely suspicious, consequences be damned. Other people's suffering just doesn't mean all that much when things start playing for serious--you would rather be "wrong on all counts" and safe than principled and dead. Well, there are a few people out there who seem to feed on Righteousness more than the rest of us; they do the right thing and are ignored, while everyone else just tries to follow the path of no resistance and hopes that the body-count will stay unseen and distant.

I don't remember the years before 9/11 with much clarity. Well, I have a few scattered memories (like I do for the years since), but I don't recall what America was like, what Americans cared about, how our politics worked. "Things changed" on 9/11...they didn't have to, but it was decided that Ameica would spread Freedom and end Terror. I've never been un-cynical enough to think that would work. Mainstream America, on the other hand, well, they just fell for it for the most part. It was interesting to see anti-War types painted as flighty Idealists (quite a few of them probably were), while those who took a "strong" stance on Terror were tough-minded Realists. It didn't help that some of the Idealists went around saying that 9/11 was a punishment for America's Collective Sinfulness...a view that would have been considerably more coherent had the hijackers come from Laos, Nicaragua, or the Sioux Nation. Last time I checked, none of the architects of America's repeated violent meddlings were killed on 9/11 (just like how most of the people who died in the War on Terror had nothing to do with 9/11 either [notice a pattern here?]. The overwhelming majority of people who die in any of these cock-ups seem to only ever be guilty of the one Sin life repeatedly punishes people for: being in the wrong place at the wrong time [speaking the wrong language looking like the wrong motherfucker]).

More importantly and more basically, the Collective Guilt Hypothesis would require that justice be possible and that people get what they deserve, which is most assuredly not the case. To paraphrase Dawkins as he paraphrased Darwin: consider just how many animals (human or otherwise) are sick and dying, how many are being consumed whole and alive, trembling in terror, or being ravaged by vicious, unflinching, remorseless parasites. Add to this the manufactured evil, the active malevolence that only conscious minds are capable of producing: men, not content to be victims, must also become vile, unsympathetic monsters. None of the great villains of history endured as much suffering as they caused. Stalin died quietly in his sleep at an advanced age (and every time Cheney gets close to kicking off, people always chime in about how "that bastard will finally get what he deserves." Yeah, right. He's lived in luxury for a very long time [maybe he's spiritually impoverished--that pious lie they feed you suckers to distract from how much being poor sucks all the time], and his fragile, degenerated body is artificially preserved by the most cutting edge advances in medical science. A dozen nicer, more humane people die every day from diseases we cured 50 yrs ago before this guy takes his morning Lipitor). How could you hold these people accountable even if you had the chance? "Kill one man, kill ten; they can only hang you once." Don't worry, tho. The evil will not be able to go on as we continually flood our bodies and land with numerous toxins. The energy will run out, the nerve-endings of our delicate, infinitely precious life support system will become increasingly sclerotic, and we will suffer and die. Actually, we won't. We'll be in our graves. Our collective children and grandchildren will have to foot that particular bill. See what I'm talking about? (But the sunset is so lovely...)

Where was I? Oh right: very few, if I remember correctly, of the tough-minded Realists seemed to contemplate the possibility that the "plan" wasn't going to work, that it would be expensive, poorly managed, have an uncertain impact on Global Terrorism, that people would simply grow tired of fighting, that Iraqis and Afghanis (or any people) aren't that interested in our world of tract houses, phony electioneering, and suspicious, resentful petit-bourgeois self-righteousness...maybe there is a universal morality, a transnational, transcultural human family--I wouldn't know. I'm an American. What I lack in sensitivity or moral clarity, I might make up for in fiscal sense (something that is becoming more rare than what one would hope to see in this nation of shop-keepers, workers, and industrialists), and I know that war is rarely, if ever, worth the investment. This is why Adam Smith encouraged nations to pay-as-you-go when committing atrocities against scared, faceless conscripts and peasants because it's usually barely worth the loss of life and capital at the time, and it almost certainly won't be worth paying for in 20 yrs. What I'm trying to say is: I hope you all got 5 Trillion dollars worth of happiness, schadenfreude, and perceived increases in protection and safety out of killing all those foreigners because that money is never coming back. In addition to this hefty sum, you might want to tack on whatever cash and security you won't be getting from Welfare State programs because those will almost certainly be cut to satisfy the imaginary need to service the monstrous deficit these wars helped create.

In my early opposition to the War, I would occasionally bring up things like Human Rights, International Law, and the "Innocents" because that's what I heard other people do. It was disingenuous. I haven't lost any sleep over the War--the carnage isn't real to me. We all see a handful of horrifying images, and make a best guess as to what would be the morally sensible thing to do. We play with text and video for a few minutes each day, and some of these manipulations get turned into votes, some of them can get construed as "political will"...the "will" becomes orders, orders become actions, actions become atrocities. Maybe we get a few minutes of happiness, or a few minutes of despair. Then we look at something else, occasionally checking back in to see what new or progressing terrors await. The whole thing is beyond our control and entirely our fault--and if we do pay for any of it, it won't be cos we're evil, just plain stupid.

+MC

Flyover

2011-08-28T23:53:00.003-04:00

Over the past couple weeks, a few progressive news sites have taken an interest in Ron Paul...namely why Paul, despite his anti-War, anti-Wall St statements, is not a good bet for this country's 12 or so progressives. Over at Alternet, an article called "5 Reasons Progressives Should Treat Ron Paul with Extreme Caution" says that Paul is "anti-woman, anti-gay, anti-black, anti-senior-citizen, anti-equality and anti-education, and that's just the start." Most of the evidence provided to support this characterization comes from Paul's poor choice in friends (Birchers, dominionists, the usual) and a few racist statements he may have written sometime in the 90s.

I didn't read the article that thoroughly, but I buy it--Paul is a standard middle American: a resentful, spiteful bigot whose every expression betrays feelings of hatred and fear. Actually, Paul comes off as pretty good-natured, which is probably why they put him on-stage. It's difficult for the average "guardian of culture" to get through a handful of sentences without revealing his or her inner Phalangist. The real successful ones leave you feeling decent for a while, until you stop and think for a minute about what they meant when they said that the Civil Rights Act was an overreach of Federal authority...God, will these people get the message already?: you're not allowed to be racists anymore. We decided it without your input or consent. Get over it. Find some other reason to hate people (it's not hard).

Of course, this is the cost of Empire: tons of land, tons of idiots, nothing works. Today, me and a friend were talking about why Americans haven't taken to the streets like people in Cairo, London, Greece, and elsewhere. I made the off-the-cuff observation that a comparatively large percentage of the people in Egypt and England live in Cairo and London, and many of the other protest-filled countries are quite small. In other words: you can walk to the riot. In America, we're all over the place: a few big cities, and open space. Sure, during the Great Depression things got so bad that people walked all the way from their frontier hellholes to D.C. to get their voices heard, but that was because they had literally nothing else to do. The type of mass movement necessary to scare the elites into thinking straight is a long way off at this point. Things suck, but they're not unbearable (and even if they are unbearable, people might just deal with it).

Another problem is that Americans are a very middling people. They get skittish around "heated rhetoric," and they're constantly searching for some compromise that'll leave everyone feeling OK (that's why they try to look at things in terms of "pro" and "con"--delineating two "acceptable" positions, and working towards a phantom middle). Given that right now we have a center-right faction and a rightwing faction squabbling over how little money they want to give retirees and poor people (and exactly how invested we should be in foreign adventurism [and how little we should regulate financial terrorists]), there are no mainstream representatives for progressive economics. There are a few people fighting to preserve the progressive insitutions of yesteryear, but they're quickly sidelined as consensus grows around the urgent necessity to service imaginary debts that can never be fully repaid.

As long as we continue to give primacy to the legal obligations of debt, we're going to keep sliding. It's a great time to be a vampire (isn't it always?): sit around, type a few things into a keyboard, set your algorithms loose on the market, and eventually retire extremely wealthy. If you fuck everything up, politicians will "reach across the aisle" in uncharacteristic displays of bipartisanship to make sure you are able to walk away with the full, marked-up, largely self-determined value of your shoddy investments. It's much less easy to be a sucker: be in debt up to your eyeballs, have nothing to show for it. This is guaranteed to continue, almost indefinitely until we have a collective conversation that goes something like this:
"Good people pay their debts. You want to be a good person, right?"
"--No I want to be free."

+MC

Colony Collapse

2011-07-28T02:37:00.005-04:00

I have a message for the Tea Party Caucus in the House: stick to your guns, you dumb hicks! Show the "elites" that your lifelong, principled refusal to understand the world around you is capable of undermining our generation's most lackluster and uncompelling political theater. Show the world that nihilism, the will-to-destroy, and mindless antagonism are greater forces than more benign attitudes like hope or apathy. Demonstrate once and for all that democracy, particularly when it is constrained by the screechiest, most repulsive contingents from Ulster America, is a really bad idea.

In this comedy of errors, the anti-progressive ambitions of the different columns don't quite add up, and as such, we're at an impasse. The default, if it goes through, would result in a substantial reduction in government activity, which is exactly what Tea Partiers want if they have been honest about their intentions so far (I wonder how long the faithful will be able to hold out against Big Government as a revenue constrained Social Security causes Flyover State economies and livelihoods to shrivel up and die). Barry has a lot to lose here: no one wants to go down in history as "the President who presided over the U.S.'s first sovereign default." If he had the chutzpah (he probably doesn't), he could unilaterally blow past the debt ceiling by citing the 14th Amendment, or Coin Seigniorage, or by making a more general appeal to Emergency Powers. Would that be illegal? Probably, but the President can pretty much do whatever he wants, and in the face of such "tyranny," the Centrists from both parties would probably do what they always do, which is to say: nothing substantial.

I find the unilateral solution aesthetically pleasing because it bypasses Congress. As I've said before: a disjointed mixture of protozoan amorality, graft, and 4 or 5 idiotic talking points will produce pure shit 99% of the time, and I'm not particularly invested in it. Taking the time to selectively deflate Congress's unwarranted self-importance would be beneficial to the legislative process, and probably enjoy a good deal of popular support. That being said, Obama is too soft and ideologically challenged to tell Congress to shove it, or do much of anything. He wants to unwind Social Security and shrink the economy through the veil of compromise, not torch the place.

With the Tea Party, there are varying levels sincerity. Eric Cantor, that sneering prick, is an obvious, documented Wall St shill, as are many of his colleagues who began talking John Galt/Sovereign Citizen in order to avoid being tossed by some inconsolable mob of yahoos during the 2010 elections. Other Partiers, I'm not sure how many, seem like the real deal: legit crazies who want to shut the government down. That's almost admirable, if only their opportunistic opposition to spending wasn't predicated on thinking the currency was still backed with gold, or suspiciously fixated on programs that benefit blacks and latinos, or supported by a fantastical reading of the Constitution, or couched in terrifying End Times rhetoric, or wasn't conspicuously absent when Bush was straight burning through cash.

And the liberal "plan": increase taxes, decrease spending, raise the retirement age (Christ, not even medieval peasants worked till they were 70), throw junk debt after junk debt. Compromise between factions with virtually identical values. It's a bad plan, not evil in the way Tea Partiers are probably told. Of course, the real solution is to do nothing: wait for the wars to wind down, let the Bush tax-cuts expire, and GDP-to-debt will get back to manageable levels (if that even matters [which it doesn't]). Social Security might have a 1T deficit by 2035? OMGOD. Dust-off whatever printing press you used during TARP and just send people cash in an envelope. Or don't. Just don't pretend it's beacause we "ran out of money."

+MC

--------------------------------
Sources:
Drew, Elizabeth. "What Were They Thinking?"

Rentier Lords, Debt Serfs: Mr (Adam) Smith Goes to Washington

2011-07-13T01:58:00.012-04:00

Men might as well be imprisoned, as excluded from the means of earning their bread. --J.S. Mill

Being semi-employed since graduation, I've been able to spend some time looking into the economy. It started when I heard people talking about the "deficit," and how we needed to fix it. Being broke, knowing tons of people who were broke, being sick, having no prospects, knowing tons of people who had no prospects, and reading about the joblessness, poverty, desperation, uncertainty, and despair that was racking the country, I began to wonder: "what's the big deal with the deficit?" It seemed like something you might want to fix eventually, but there were more pressing issues such as...you know...not letting the country implode.

Let's start from the beginning: the basic idea behind the classical economic conception of capitalism was to purify the market of feudal constraints on productive labor and profits, any structure of excessive rent, tribute, interest that allowed someone to "grow richer, as it were in their sleep, without working, risking, or economizing." In other words: useless money-making, which is best to tax away to keep the prices of labor and goods close to their values. Progressive Era economics took this basic aversion to rent-seeking behavior and applied it to various public utilities (roads, power, schools, rail, pensions) to keep people from "extracting income by placing tollbooths on the economy’s key infrastructure." One could make similar arguments for other utilities or goods like the internet or health insurance or any other service that would ideally be subsidized, but instead the prices of which are ratcheted up to pointlessly drain wages from the economy for the benefit of like 5 dudes.

Given this rather rational framework for exchanges of goods and services, it almost goes without saying that the exact opposite is at work in America today. Instead of capitalism, we have a new feudalism, in which rent-seeking behavior has been driven to the center of the economy and political leadership at the expense of everyone else. Most of a working-person's wages are eaten up in fees, "tolls," rent, debts, and regressive taxes instead of reasonably-priced goods and services; the small and medium-sized businesses that create economic productivity are given no help, while wealth-siphoning, roulette-wheel trusts are given trillions of bucks; all the while, public goods, the ones that haven't already been handed over to monopolizers and financiers, will get the chop or be significantly reduced.

As Karl Marx described, industrial capitalism brings the proletarians and the bourgeois into close proximity, which brings the class struggle into sharp focus, such that a final resolution might be had. Unfortunately, the switch is on: financial capital owns and drains both. Instead of taxing rent-seeking behavior, we tax payrolls, profits, beer, tobacco, goods, all the things an economy is supposed to produce to give breaks to people who produce nothing. Instead of having a human conversation or confrontation between labor and capital, we have a virtual, invisible feudalism with the main difference between this and serfs in the Middle Ages is that serfs got more holidays.

It goes without saying that the mainstream discourse will hear nothing of this. "Usury-capitalism" is "capitalism-as-usual" with paltry explanations given for why the only growth is for CEO profits and Wall St bonuses, everyone's wages are stagnating or declining, benefits are shrinking or disappearing, and there's no job creation. Phrases like "jobless recovery" are bandied about without irony, funds that were intended for small business growth have not been dispersed, and the Administration has started telling people not to expect things to get better "anytime soon." But don't worry: we're all sharing in the pain. Occasionally, we'll talk about abortion or gay marriage or some other bullshit in order to remind ourselves that not only does our society have monumental, undeserved class differences, but also intractable differences in values and taste.

In light of all this, I have the following mature response to the politicians pondering the "deficit question:" print a multi-trillion dollar check, hand it to yourselves, and consider the issue settled (we all know you can do that anytime you want, you just don't feel like it--I checked). Oh, and while you're at it: stop fighting wars on credit, stop plundering the SS fund to give tax-breaks to your rich, asshole friends, stop trying to slash pensions, stop throwing junkies in jail, give debt-relief to students, start a jobs program, end regressive taxation schemes, tax land, bring a balanced schedule to Major League Baseball, lay down high-speed rail, install decent broadband countrywide, plan a manned-mission to Mars, rebuild our crumbling energy infrastructure, get the schools patched up, open up some more libraries, and create some sort of national health insurance system...anything else? Right: reduce the Congressional salary to minimum wage and modify the 1st Amendment slightly, such that using the word "courageous" to describe a plan that forces janitors and brick-layers to work until they're 70 and takes money away from old women and disabled veterans is a criminal offense, punishable by firing squad.

+MC

---------------------------------------------
Sources:
Hudson, Michael. "Adam Smith critiques the Deficit Reduction Commission."
Mill, J.S. Principles of Political Economy
with some of their Applications to Social Philosophy.

Go, Obama!

2011-07-12T01:33:00.000-04:00

Ah, easy street again. George Bush was extremely easy to hate. Everything about him sucks: his stupid-looking face, his ridiculous policies, his loathsome cabinet, his halting, borderline incomprehensible speech patterns. Obama is trickier to hate because he's more photogenic, a better speaker, kind of funny in that bland, easy-going way boring Americans find so endearing. I never liked Obama, but I don't like anyone, and even still I tried to avoid seeing him speak for fear of being drawn in by his Luciferian charm.

I don't need to worry about that anymore. Obama has evolved into the full-fledged aloof asshole he was always meant to be. His willigness to put Social Security on the chopping block in the name of "deficit reduction" is an excellent "let them eat cake" moment in a decade that is already chock-full of them. The American people know how they want the completely artificial "deficit problem" fixed, and it doesn't involve taking away benefits and entitlements that are purchased by every regressively taxed pay-check of their miserable, half-broke, working-stiff lives. The only people still on board with him these days are "liberal" hacks who are having an increasingly difficult time finding ways to sell universally unwanted entitlement cuts as great progressive politics, and their credulous marks who for some hitherto unknown reason still hold out hope that behind his anti-progressive policies, actions, opinions, lifelong tendencies, and public statements, Obama is a Great Liberal Statesmen at heart.

Of course, unless you live in Florida or Ohio, Obama doesn't really care what you think about him or his intentions: "who are you going to vote for instead? Michele 'One L' Bachmann? Elle-oh-elle. That literally makes me want to laugh in your stupid face. Where are you from? Maryland? Spoiler alert: your state is going to vote Democrat until Global Climate Change sucks every land-mass east of Appalachia into the Atlantic. If you need me, I'll be on the links."

Then again, there's no reason to think that people who live in Florida or Ohio are going to appreciate tossing grandma's hard-earned retirement to a bunch of degenerate rentier parasites more than people do anywhere else so I'm not sure I buy the line that this is some sort of "Triangulation 2.0" strategy (a rightward move to snatch up moderates/independents in the face of general craziness that keeps progressive-types on board). In order for this sort of Third Way bullshit to work, the economy needs to be going pretty good. Ours, if you hadn't noticed, sucks. Also, Social Security is more conspicuous than other Reaganite/Clintonian measures to destroy public goods: people like Social Security and don't want you to fuck with it. I can't think of a way to sell it. I don't think Obama cares about selling it anymore. It will get done, and then he'll leave...and be replaced by someone who'll be pretty much more of the same.

+MC

--------------------------------------

Sources:
Hudson, Michael. "Rolling Back the Progressive Era."
Taibbi, Matt. "Obama Doesn't Want a Progressive Deficit Deal."
Wray, L Randall. "Pinch-Hitting for Peterson. Part 1: How Progressives Helped Put Social Security on the Chopping Block."

Show Trial

2011-07-06T01:39:00.005-04:00

"That's how we stay young these days: murder and suicide"

--E Ionesco

Our courts are possibly the only quasi-philosophical institutions in an otherwise impoverished public culture, reflecting certain longstanding traditions and principles through the lens of modern crime, which would be quite interesting except that most of our criminal laws are stupid and most crimes are uninteresting. A great example of this is Kentucky v. King in which the court ruled that exigent circumstances allow for a warrantless search of a location even if the police created such circumstances. Interesting, and then when one reads the facts of the case this rather routine example of banal totalitarianism becomes downright sad: the Kentucky police are pursuing a guy they just sold crack to in a sting (srsly? don't they have anything better to do?) and they lose him in an apartment complex; they smell marijuana coming from one of the flats so they knock on the door at which point they hear the sound of "destruction of evidence" (one of those useless perceptual categories which will no doubt directly result in the incarceration of God-knows-how-many Blacks and Latinos)... given this possibly catastophic turn of events, they do what any reasonable law enforcement agents would do in a sane and just society by busting down the door: some dude is sitting in his living room with a couple pounds of reefer. He gets railroaded into 10 years hard-time, all the while the original target of the "sting" is nowhere to be found. So: not only did the Court make the wrong ruling in light of our Constitutional and common-law commitments to the relative sanctity of the household, but we are also left with people who aren't criminals being pursued and incarcerated as a result of committing non-crimes by "Kentucky's finest."

Kentucky v. King got perfunctory coverage, and its implications were digested by people who are already on the look out for this sort of pointless expansion of law enforcement authority in what is already shaping up to be one of the lousier decades on record for such matters. Constitutional challenges, unfortunately, don't always have the visceral appeal of real True Crime nastiness, which is why coverage will almost invariably reach its highest peaks of inane displays of sensationalizing grief porn. Media-saturated trials are a great chance to see the American legal tradition contrasted with populist rage: the calls for blood side-by-side with the slow, ponderous process of introducing layer after layer of circumstancial evidence. In a society where we expect to see a smoking gun after 42 minutes of cutting edge forensics and hard-hitting police work, the reality pales in comparison. Yes, Casey Anthony was probably guilty (srsly? who doesn't report a missing child for a month?), yes, she's a terrible mother who probably engaged in unpardonable sins against the most sacred bond on the planet because having a kid is so much less fun than going out and getting tanked, yes, we were probably witnessing the swan song of Western culture (well, not "we"--I was busy getting my drink on) as bored, vapid 30-something women dutifully waited for what they hoped would be the ritual sacrifice of an objectively bad person in order to fill whatever slowly diminishing void the post-modern reality of soul-less anti-life allows for the part of the human spirit that once held hope and enchantment...only to have such fidelity heartlessly betrayed by the deadening obelisk of early modern jurisprudence and the sad fact that there just wasn't enough evidence to convict.

How is that the downfall of Western culture, you say? Well, it isn't. We've always liked our public executions, the original reality television. Nothing allows a rest for the work-weary, hopeless mind like open displays of jeering sadism. "Justice": the projection of the desire for the sweet release of blood and death onto sanctioned targets, our moral sense floating freely over an endless spectacle. Who cares about victims so far away? You wake up, drink coffee, go to work (or don't), read news, comment on your blog or Facebook, watch TV, sleep. Oh, a bad person dies. There's a faint stirring in the chest (or more weakly in the mind). "Good."

+MC

She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named Redux

2011-06-23T18:35:00.003-04:00

Matt Taibbi just came out with a piece about Michele Bachmann--nothing brilliant, pretty standard Taibbi faire at this point: 5,000 words filled with new and different ways of referring to a public figure as a crazed hypocrite. I thoroughly enjoy Taibbi's work because it's frequently mean-spirited and uncharitable, which satisfies my pathological aversion to the standard American fixations on niceness and compromise. Nothing is off limits for someone you hate: bizarre religious convictions, demented appearance, abysmal professional track-record...anything you can use to get your audience charged up and ready to bust some heads. Bust some heads? Oh sorry. I forgot what country, time period, and discourse I'm operating in. What I meant to say is that you're trying to get your audience to look beyond differences and participate in a civilized, polite engagement with the human spirit even as your enemies actively screw you and your descendants out of a meaningful future.

Where was I? Oh yeah: Abe Sauer over at TheAwl took issue with Taibbi's piece. His first problem is that Taibbi was lazy and didn't properly source. Fair point, although Taibbi's editor over at RS claims that any sourcing errors are being remedied as we speak. Another problem Sauer identified is how Taibbi's piece is "unnecessarily mean" and gives Bachmann "legitimate evidence that the fabled leftist mainstream media is attacking her" to such an extent that "it wouldn't be surprising to see Bachmann's own campaign distributing photocopies of it in Iowa." Right, because people that would probably vote for Bachmann anyway might be energized to...still vote for Bachmann--anything but that! Sauer also points out how Taibbi ignores Bachmann's economic indiscretions (involving accepting government hand-outs in the form of farm subsidies and her possible involvement in a Ponzi scheme) in favor of scoring points with the coastal elites by focusing on her anti-gay agenda and ridiculous millenial Protestant bullshit.

Well, ideally one would have the space and audience patience to go into a tour-de-force, but if I had to choose, I would attack someone's character before plunging into the ambiguous netherworld of small-town corruption. We don't hate people because they're on the take; we hate them because they're deranged and dangerous. That's the message. Don't deviate, concede or dilute, and you have a decent chance of winning because appealing to people's baser instincts always, always works. You need to say things like this: "[imagine] Joe McCarthy dragging Cabinet members into hearings and demanding that they publicly disavow the works of Groucho Marx, and you get a rough idea of the general style of Bachmannian politics" and this: "Bachmann's entire political career has followed [the] exact same pattern of God-speaks-directly-to-me fundamentalism mixed with pathological, relentless, conscienceless lying"...or you could take the moral high-ground and watch as your more flexible opponents appeal to the racial/religious paranoia of their unmoving, imbecilic base and win again.

Of course, Liberals need to assume that the robber barons and the unreflective bores that follow them are actually decent people deep-down, or else the project might collapse in incoherence. Taibbi identifies some of the problems surrounding this when he talks about the "price of contemptuous laughter," and how it turns people like Bachmann into serious contenders for all those poor souls who "have read and enjoyed the Left Behind books." If only those credulous plebs would drop the God-talk and politics of ressentiment and stop the brinksmanship associated with putting serious craziness uncomfortably close to serious power and serious weaponry. In other words: if only we could somehow convince them to shed the few things that keep their lives meaningful in exchange for the satisfaction that comes with being Liberal and elite. Regrettably, being Liberal is so boring I couldn't recommend it to anyone with a clean conscience even if it means sleeping a little less easily.

+MC

--------------------------------------------------------------
Sources:
Sauer, Abe. "Shallow 'Rolling Stone' Hit-Piece is Just What Michele Bachmann Needs."
Taibbi, Matt. "Michele Bachmann's Holy War."

She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named

2011-06-04T01:26:00.002-04:00

I try not to talk about Sarah Palin on the internet out of the paranoid fear that an increase in chatter will cause the mainstream media panopticon to think that Palin is a "thing," which could potentially lend more credibility to a White House run, putting that faux-populist degenerate unacceptably close to possessing the Nuclear Football. Anyone who thinks that the "Woman of the North" has the strength of character or strategic foresight necessary to oversee the deployment of America's massive WMD-complex is a traitor against humanity and planet Earth. It's fine to have a principled disagreement over whether we should, you know, do something with this country's wealth and resources, or just transfer all the wealth directly to the bank accounts of the chosen few--but this is simply not one of those times. It speaks to the more primal issue of whether we want to live (which is a fine discussion to have, but only if we speak about it directly rather than allow it to be decided by something as sad and hopeless as an election in the United States).

Fortunately, most people don't like Palin. She lost a considerable amount of political capital after her humorlessly self-important response to the shooting in AZ, which was a rather odd mis-step for her to make. Public tragedies are like a religion for Americans. We all enter a state of solemn silence and meditate on how we will be able to overcome the non-event du jour and move forward as a Nation. That's it. Using a tragedy as an opportunity to accuse your enemies of perpetrating acts of Medieval anti-Semitic scapegoating against you is...just not on the menu. If you want to be ironic move to Continental Europe. The rest of us will be mourning. Seemingly unaware of this painfully obvious convention, Palin lost a lot of goodwill and seemed like she might disappear forever.

...but she's back. Temporarily. I don't think she's gonna give a serious run. Getting credulous plebs to buy your dreadful books is much, much easier than actually trying to get elected. As Alexander Cockburn pointed out over at CounterPunch: "It’s a safe bet that Ms Palin will be playing the Will she/Won’t she game as far as the elastic will stretch without breaking." In order to stay in the spot-light, she recently traveled to New England and gave an account of the early days of the American Revolution that nearly matches the Katie Couric interview in terms of sheer incoherence. She, somehow, managed to mess up the story of Paul Revere. How do you even do that? I thought every elementary school attendee was told the story of "the British are coming! The British are coming!" Palin was apparently sick the 9 or 10 times that story is trotted out during a standard primary education, and instead seems to think that Revere ran around to inform the British that the Americans were ready to fight. Theoretically, she could have intentionally fucked the story to score a few pro-gun rights votes, but the story could be played pro-gun if it was told straight up. I think that she honestly doesn't know the Paul Revere myth, or couldn't recall the details of a straightforward children's story under pressure, which is sad, and should disqualify her from working on a small-town early evening news program let alone as Commander-in-Chief, but her word salad, vaguely populist speech patterns are nothing new. Actually, they are simply what she is.

Of course, "idiocy=authenticity" in this stupid country, and Liberals are constrained by a discourse that can't acknowledge certain plain facts about the human condition, namely that people from Wahhabist hell-holes such as the Bible-belt have incredibly bad taste. There's also the perception that since Liberals are in favor of what could generally be termed a "more humane society," they should not allow the discourse to be lowered by being mean and nasty. The suckers and losers who make up the Moronic Peckerwood wing of the GOP are free to spew unlettered bile, but Liberals must turn the other cheek, rise above the fray, and say nothing because if they indulge in hatred or passion or spite they will become that which they hate. That might be true to some extent, but is also a surefire way to lose an argument, hearts and minds, and "the War" (so to speak). So: if you hate your enemies, do them the kindness of letting them know how you really feel. Civility is a luxury, and is also in need of some cheaper thrills.

+MC

Terrorshow

2011-05-03T03:58:00.004-04:00

(pictured above: how you like me now?)

"I will take vengeance on my adversaries and repay those who hate me. I will make my arrows drunk with blood, while my sword devours flesh" --Hashem, Deut 32:41

I am one of the few people I know who thought invading Afghanistan was most likely a bad move (at the time the idea was being proposed, mind you--well ahead of all the myopics who have since grown tired of thinking about war and now oppose our presence there). I assumed that a guy like bin Laden, if he had any sense, would be long gone by the time the U.S. arrived, and we would just never find him (my naive thinking at the time was that the purpose of the War on Terror should be to, you know, destroy Al-Qaeda, not faff about). There are so many crevices and caves in AfPak, someone could keep a low profile and hide out indefinitely. As it turns out, bin Laden didn't even need to worry about that. Instead, he got a "nice" compound in an affluent suburb near Islamabad, no doubt as a gift from the ISI for services rendered.

That being said, the liquidation of Osama bin Laden is one of the few legitimate high points in the War on Terror. Naturally, a crusade as preposterous as the one our nation talked itself into some 10 years back is doomed to have precious few high points--what with our "battle plan" relying on people choosing representative government over indulging in longstanding tribal hatreds, and our closest "allies" being the same people who created and financed the organizations we're trying to destroy. There's also the cost, both in lives and dollars, of this undertaking, and one wonders whether it would have been possible to find and kill Osama and his friends without two invasions, hundreds of thousands dead, many more displaced, traumatized and wounded, $1.18 T down the toilet (think of all the starving people we could have fed, all the cool stuff we could have built) all so that Iraq and Afghanistan can end up being more or less as they were.

If all this was necessary to find and kill bin Laden, I would be forced to say that we'd all have been better of just letting him get away with it. The innocent dead would go unavenged, but sometimes justice is just not worth it.

Nevertheless, justice has been achieved. Don't listen to the killjoys: Osama taking a bullet right in the computer was justice. Sure, we could have captured him and have him face trial at some indeterminate point in the future, but we didn't, and honestly: so the fuck what? The U.S. Court System is not the sole arbiter of what is just and unjust (once it stops throwing people in the slammer for being junkies, I might revise my opinion).

Based on the details that are forthcoming, the mission was tremendously effective. Months of planning and preparation, followed by an intense 40 minute firefight. Proof of death was obtained (something that most likely would not have been possible if the compound was bombarded) after which, his corpse was (with I hope minimal ceremony) tossed in the ocean. Conspiracies will no doubt abound as to why the body was not loaded into the bed of an F-150 and driven around the country with Skynyrd on full-blast so that all inquiring minds could see SEAL Team 6's handiwork for themselves (although the Powers-That-Be could fake a corpse if so inclined), but then again, some people will never be satisfied with any explanation.

Of course, there is also the tut-tutting that accompanies moments like these: "don't you think it's...uh...not very nice to take such obvious pleasure in the death of a guy you hate? After all, this is a Serious Moral Issue, one that should not be handled with any levity or strong positive emotions, but only solemn, reverent contemplation about the brotherhood of mankind and the gravity of taking a human life." Well, those are pretty decent points actually, but I would respond by saying that people react to significant events in all sorts of ways, and that frequently the loudest, most exuberant outbursts get the most attention. Additionally, many people would be lying if they said they were in any way sad or upset about bin Laden being killed (as I wrote on my old blog last year: "if we [...] catch bin Laden (before his kidneys do), I wouldn't be particularly perturbed by the thought of state-sanctioned killing heading his way. The world will not miss [him]" ). The idea, tho, is that we should hold ourselves to a standard higher than one that encourages us to exhibit sheer, tribalistic glee at the demise of a blood enemy, but I've never placed much stock in the ethnocentric notion that we are or can be any less "primitive" or irrational than the people we oppose.

+MC

E-Z Money

2011-04-10T03:36:00.001-04:00

Finally, the number of actual slaveholders in the South of the Union does not amount to more than three hundred thousand, a narrow oligarchy that is confronted with many millions of so-called poor whites, whose numbers have been constantly growing through concentration of landed property and whose condition is only to be compared with that of the Roman plebeians in the period of Rome's extreme decline. Only by acquisition and the prospect of acquisition of new Territories, as well as by filibustering expeditions, is it possible to square the interests of these poor whites with those of the slaveholders, to give their restless thirst for action a harmless direction and to tame them with the prospect of one day becoming slaveholders themselves.

--Karl Marx, "The North American Civil War"

You can't talk about class in this country. If you could, everything that's been going on in the last 30 yrs is very easy to understand: a small elite of plutocrats decided they wanted to drain all the money and life out of everyone in the trashiest way possible. No dignity of work, no coherent ideology, no honor, integrity, or any of those other consoling lies--just squeezing juice & draining life.

Of course, you just can't step to the podium and say, "we're going to rob all you motherfuckers blind and there's nothing you can do about it" because people have always had the capability to reshape the world in a large variety of ways. If every worker stayed home tomorrow, society as we know it would cease to exist, at least until the strike was broken. You need a way to trick people so that wealth-transfer comes off as a great favor, particularly in a society like the U.S. where the nominal requirement for holding government power in most offices is winning some sort of election.

That's where the moronic peckerwoods come in. These guys, without fail, will fall for anything. All you need to do is bring up "values" or "our way of life," and they will support you, fight wars for you. It doesn't matter whether you actually support their "values"--they're too stupid to check. Just bring up something about the threat of blacks, gays, secularists, feminists, marxists, Muslims, or some other Other, and you'll be fine. After you've erected a wall of xenophobic, yokel paranoia, you can get down to your real job: enriching yourself and, most importantly, your corporate backers.

Which brings me to the budget. What's going on: the two factions of the Business Party are fighting over several trivialities. They need a sticking point: "Ah, Planned Parenthood. That'll keep 'em distracted." And it works. It will always work. I feel very strongly about reproductive rights, and Christian "virtue" prevents moronic peckerwoods from seeing Planned Parenthood as anything other than legal genocide. The gloves will come off. The scenery can collapse, infrastructure can be gutted, discourse can be reduced to direct insults and threats, but the debate over the ethical status of an embryo will go on.

Abortion's not the main issue. Plutocrats, for the most part, don't care if "life" begins at conception, or at some time in your late 30s. The target, from what I can tell, is Social Security, that multi-trillion dollar holdover from that pre-post-ideological neverland of the early 20th century when people actually seemed to care about a few things. I imagine the average capitalist regards Social Security with the same ravenous mania a starving man regards a steak--especially with all these boomers set to retire (and they'll live forever, those health-conscious, teetotaling, Lipitor-popping morons).

This is where austerity comes in. You can't tell people Social Security needs to be carved up if they think there is tons of money lying around. No. They need to think that we are running out of money, that the Chinese will own our children as debt-surfs, that Weimar-level inflations will have people's savings wiped out in minutes, that the Treasury will stop printing notes because there's no more left. It's all gone. Naturally, austerity won't do a damned thing, particularly with all those poor suckers whose livelihoods got permanently trashed during the last spin of the roulette wheel. They aren't paying taxes, and some of them even have the gall to drain a few pennies from the money pile due to some as-yet-unrepealed law that doesn't totally screw the recently-unemployed poor (probably passed by Nixon, the last somewhat decent American President).

The point is not whether austerity will do anything, or how much money we can theoretically borrow or churn out, it's about the perception that the cash-flow is tightening. Once the perception is in place (notice: that's the one thing both "sides" seem to "agree" on), all that's left is to break out the carving knives a few years down the line. It's easy money, and credulous losers will worship every cut.

+MC

Bullets, bullets, bullets

2011-04-02T02:19:00.001-04:00

When I was watching The Baader-Meinhof Complex (fantastic film--not optional, as they say), a movie about the Red Army Faction, those lovable German Marxist morons, one scene absolutely floored me: Andreas Baader is going over one "revolutionary" plan or another, and one of his colleagues asks him, "do you think this will work?"

Non-plussed, Baader stares at his comrade for half a second, then replies, "what a bourgeois question." I died. I was reminded of the American neo-cons, those wayward Trotskyists, and their zeal leading up to the invasion of Iraq.We don't need four divisions of armor sent to Kuwait. Only one will do because the Iraqis love us. To doubt the plan is counter-revolutionary.

The Op/Ed section over at Al-Jazeera has been thinking of better and more creative ways to elaborate a similar sentiment: military intervention in Libya will tarnish the revolutionary will of the participants in the Arab Spring. Ah, right because revolutionary will stops bullets (ask the Righteous Harmony Society).

I guess the best way to test this hypothesis would be to look around and see how the fine citizens are doing in other Arab and North African countries. Looks like they're still pretty pissed off. So much for that theory.

We all know that intervention is sub-optimal for a variety of reasons, but you need to ask yourself: are you more committed to maintaining the absolute "purity" of the revolution (if there even is such a thing) or protecting innocent civilians from what would almost assuredly be a brutal and violent crackdown? Furthermore, would you protect the "integrity" of the revolution at the cost of the revolution? Gaddafi, God bless him, represents a really important problem in the fight for liberty: some leaders will step down when it is made abundantly clear to them that very few people want them to be in power anymore; others will hold on till the bitter end no matter what. Brother Leader only cares about staying in power. That's all he's ever cared about. The only way to get him out is for someone to force him out. Or sit around and wait for him to die.

Naturally, we all want to live in a world that works like the TV show NCIS: good guys win, bad guys lose, principles are never compromised (bureaucratic technicalities, on the other hand, get in the way of real American justice). In a world like that, being in the right ensures victory and bullets have a moral compass. Our world doesn't seem to work that way.

+MC

Ignorantia Juris

2011-04-01T02:06:00.000-04:00

A few days ago, I woke up and saw that I had a missed call. Listened to the voice-mail. It was my school calling about a series of checks I had been sent over the past couple weeks. I switched out of a class, and ended up dropping a credit. This entitled me to a refund of a little over a hundred dollars. I got a check for a $109. Then a check for $9. Then two more checks for $9. Then a check for $3. There might have been another check in there somewhere for a similarly small amount.

The voice-mail informed me that one of the checks was a duplicate. If I tried to deposit a duplicate check, I would be guilty of fraud and prosecuted. Fortunately for me, I suspected something was fishy with the series of low-value checks and kept them sitting on a table, and in a forever deferred part my of to-do list.

Not one to incur the wrath of the law, I drove up to school and handed all the checks to one of the cashiers at the Bursar's. She remarked that the parts and labor needed to assemble some of these checks probably costed more than their printed values. She was told not to complain in front of a customer. The woman who told her not to complain seemed more knowledgeable about balances and checks, and took over my case.

One of the $9 checks was a duplicate. She removed it from the pile, told me to keep the rest, and made me a photocopy of the duplicate check for my records. I thanked her and left.

On the way to deposit my rectified and regenerated stack of checks, I started to day-dream about a theoretical court case involving my unknowing commission of a $9 check fraud. "Ignorance of the law is not an excuse," I would be told. They would throw the book at me. This sort of fiscal lawlessness would not be tolerated by a person of my class. If I would have known the law, really known the law, known the ins-and-outs of how to avoid or how to seem to avoid fraudulent dealings, and hide my activity behind a network of capital, loans, interest rates, swaps, and margins (as opposed to a single Student Checking Account), I couldn't claim ignorance of the law. No one would throw the book at me either.

+MC